The photos in this edition are what I most prize...other books on Thomas Merton have no visuals of his life activities... ( )

Thomas Merton's life, warts and all. There are generally two reactions when people find out that spiritually-inspiring people have warts. They either think that makes them unworthy, or they think it makes them more real. My reaction, however, is that if Thomas Merton, after putting in years of meditation, can end up a normal human being who can fail to connect with people and use them for his own gratification, what's the point of all the work? I can do that without wasting years in meditation. I highly recommend this book for spiritual seekers who are starting to wonder if there's any treasure at the end of the quest. ( )

2090 The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton, by Michael Mott (read 31 Jul 1987) This is a 1984 biography. Merton was born in France on Jan 31, 1915, and died in Bangkok, Thailand, on Dec 10, 1968. I enjoyed the first part of the book, but from 1965 on Merton was increasingly unstable in his vocation--even carrying on with a nurse to some extent--and some of his ideas are far too much for me. I would like to read some of his early works. I also would like to visit Gethsemani in Kentucky. ( )

Gethsemani trip, 4-2013

While many biographies and studies of the writer and monk Thomas Merton have been published over the years, The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton remains the official biography sanctioned by the Thomas Merton Legacy Trust. Mott was given access to all of the private journals that, according to Merton's legacy, were not to be made public for 25 years after his death. (These have now been released; see for example The Intimate Merton, which contains a selection of these journal entries.) Mott's goal in this work was to approach the writer in a balanced manner--to correct the record where Merton himself may have had the facts wrong (early childhood material, for example), and to offer a different interpretation at times from the one Merton himself comes to in his own autobiographical writings. Above all Mott is not writing hagiography: this is no life of a saint, at least not in the stereotyped sense. But it is clearly the life of a real 20th-century man who, along with the expected dead ends and blind alleys, did find himself listening to a real call and following it as deeply and as passionately as his life would allow. And who knows? Perhaps that's a good definition of saint. --Doug Thorpe ( )